Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: For many inhabitants of northern Nigeria, the cure may be worse than the disease.

After enduring years of murderous attacks by the hardline Islamist group Boko Haram, they now face an all-out assault from government forces by land and air.

The state of emergency imposed by President Goodluck Jonathan has deployed thousands of troops and authorized airstrikes in the mainly Muslim north.

But locals say they fear the Nigerian military as much as they fear the jihadist insurgents. They point to an incident last month in which the army torched a village and killed more than 180 people. Locals say they were fellow villagers — a contention supported by human rights groups — the army insists they were Islamic rebels.

What is not in doubt isthat Boko Haram (western education is sinful) has been terrorizing northerners since 2009. It wants to impose Islamic law on the area, an impoverished region with a mass of jobless and uneducated youth, and fractured by ethnicity as much as by religion.

Editorial writers at the Nigerian Sun support the declaration of emergency with a caveat — the troops must behave.

[It is] a welcome step in the effort to halt the reign of anarchy in the North-east geo-political zone of the country. Though the intervention is somewhat belated, it is commendable that the president has, at last, taken this pragmatic action to ease tension and stop the upsurge of violence in parts of northern Nigeria … The objective of the emergency rule, which is the end of the Boko Haram militancy and the restoration of peace, must be firmly kept in view by everyone. The declaration of this emergency without the removal of state governors should stem the strident opposition to the deployment of troops, so the troops must not do anything to antagonize ordinary citizens of the states, as this may jeopardize their operations.

Late in coming, short on expectations, confusing in details and even doubtful in prospects, the state of emergency is at best, the first tentative steps towards addressing the insurgency.… [T]he measures announced by government seem half-hearted and not comprehensive enough. Not only is there no known time-line for the emergency rule, the framework for success or failure has not been defined. For instance, at what point would the exercise be deemed a victory? When the death toll of innocent victims falls and by what margin? Or is it when actual fighting ends totally?

In a comment piece, The British newspaper The Guardian focuses on the plight of the north’s unlucky inhabitants caught in the cross-fire.

It is difficult to talk about the trail of destruction Boko Haram has left without mentioning the military’s indiscriminate response. As Human Rights Watch has chronicled, a military raid on Baga in April left 2,000 burned homes and 183 bodies. The Nigerian military not only denies the figures, and refuses to investigate, but says if there were atrocities they were carried out by insurgents. No one is denying that it has a brutal enemy to fight. But the terrified civilians caught in the middle have to be able to distinguish the actions of terrorists and the actions of government. As things stand, that is hard to do. In Maiduguri, the town where Boko Haram first emerged, you have a choice: to be gunned down by Boko Haram or by the military. What you cannot do is seek the military’s protection, without being considered one of the enemy it is fighting. It’s a well known catch-22 of anti-insurgency warfare. Either you are an insurgent, in which case you are summarily executed, or you are not one, but deemed to be sheltering them, in which case the same fate awaits.

At the Nigerian newspaper The Punch, Dayo Olaide blames the structure of Nigerian society itself

Every ethnic and religious group is suspicious of potential domination by the other; and has no confidence that the other group, if given power, would protect its own interest. This suspicion runs deep in the politics and governance across the country. It is responsible for the wide inequality, exclusion and rivalry that have devastated the north. The north remains chronically poor and worse off than the rest of the country in many development indicators. This is in spite of its record of producing the most number of Nigeria’s presidents. The northern political hegemons failed to develop the region due to their inordinate greed. The result is high level of illiterate, unemployable labour force that is frequently instrumentalized by its political elite.

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